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This story was submitted to the People's War site by the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Gloucestershire on behalf of Ernest Brooks BEM with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. It was told to Tim Entwisle at Tewkesbury, on 18 May 2005.

Early days

I joined the Glosters on 15 March 1940. I did the normal training and the MT (Motor Transport) course. I went to the County Ground at Bristol for transportation to the Gloucestershire Regiment. When I came out of the lavatory I was asked to volunteer for Special Service and went to Headington Hall in Oxford to make up the troop. I spent two weeks there and then went to Weymouth to join the 4 Commando.
From Weymouth I was doing night-time naval patrols to beyond the Isle of Wight. Two of us were on the patrol boat, others were positioned on fishing smacks on Weymouth Bay while the rest of the Commando were stationed up on the White Horse hill.

Training on landing craft

We left Weymouth in September by train to Dumbarton. We dropped our kit on the boat on the harbour, the sugar tanker, HMS Glen Gyle. It was our home for a couple of weeks.
The food on board the Glen Gyle was out of this world; we had the number one cooks on board. We were in the stern quarters and we had to come amidships to get the food. I remember being ‘slave’ one day, fetching breakfast back to our quarters in the pitch dark. I was looking to see where the cables were for the boat but I stopped on the wrong side of the cable — and that was me gone! The breakfast went overboard into the loch. I had to go and explain to the cooks and get more breakfasts.
We took the boat to Loch Fynne and started training on amphibious landings. We spent a fortnight there.
The 4 Commando were the first to use landing craft. The Glen Gyle was fitted out with them. We dropped the boat over the side and scrambled down a net. This was quite a feat in the dark. I remember the time when Fred (Brooking) couldn’t find the next step. I sent him back to try again. He had been standing on the anti-mine cable that went all the way around the boat. His next step would have been a big one, 20 feet into the water.
When landing in Norway the drop-fronted landing craft I was aboard was opened to early. The craft flooded to the bottom of our seats and I wondered whether we were going to get home to England.
We came back to Ayre for 3 weeks and were told to find digs in Troon. My troop was working the guard and it was hard work finding places in the dark. The lady in the butcher’s was helpful (she later became my wife). We found civilian billets and paid as lodgers. Not the shilling a day the army paid. We paid out of our own pockets.

Norway raids - Svolver

Troon was our headquarters. From there we did the first raid into Svolver in Norway. We left through Scapa Flow.
In Svolver I took a taxi through town with to find the highest ranking German in Svolver. We went to his house. Frank held the family downstairs. I went upstairs to search his belongings for German identification but I found nothing. So I went downstairs and took him back in the taxi to the boat. I pointed my 45 at him over the seat while Frank sat next to him. We handed him over and went out on another trip.
In Svolver we had chocolates for the few children that were there. The landing craft needed to be pushed off — it was a wet push-off.
On our first trip out on the mountains we captured a German who had been a WWI POW and could speak English. We went easy on him but asked him to tell his mates what to do. I had my 45 and I told him I didn’t want it to speak to them.
Next time we were sent to Norway we were going as resident troops but there was an alarm that the Germans had been made aware of the landings and we came home as they didn’t want to risk lives.
We spent time up on islands in the North Sea re-invading islands. The presence of our bodies was more important than anything else.

Mountaineering training

I was drafted into Mountain Warfare Training, with Frank Smythe and John Hunt, in Snowdonia. This was located at Capel Curig on the Nenfrancon Pass. Smythe was the first one to have a bash at Everest. I became the number one climber for the group. Hunt told me that I had the natural aptitude of a monkey.

Cliff landings

We undertook a cliff landing in Cornwall, which was filmed to demonstrate our capability to do cliff landings directly from a landing craft. There was a bit of shrapnel flying around. We lost one who drowned. Lovat was in charge. We had practised in a quarry at Falmouth. When they asked for volunteers the whole squad stepped forward.
I was nominated to go on the ferry-boat ferrying the Canadians from Greenland to Scotland in 1942. They were happy times with the Canucks. I did a couple of trips and then went back to training.

Training

Everything we did was some form of training. In Troon the circuit was 5 miles and we did it in 42 minutes.
In another exercise we left Kilmarnock at 1015 and marched 90 miles to Annan by 9 o’clock that night. We got a lift to Carlisle where we spent the night in the old salvation army hall. In the morning we were up and away to Keswick where we spent three days ‘cud-bashing’, camping out and travelling around the mountains. Just ourselves, the Captain and Lieutenant; we were all as ignorant as each other but we learnt — it was a great time.
Just below Carlisle, Frank and I flagged a car back to Troon. The owners were wonderful people; it was as if we had been friends for years. They took us to their home in Glasgow, a most beautiful place with food that was out of this world. We spent the night there and they whipped us back to catch a train to Troon.
Up in the lakes we did boat training in what were, more-or-less, large canoes. We practised wet landings and wet take-offs.
Long distance marches were something we did as the whole Commando (usually exercises were done in the troop), which would have been about 450 men. There were 30-40 men in each troop, A to H troop and an HQ group. I started in B Troop and then in later days I was in E Troop.
I got chased on to different courses. After three years I was a leading sergeant. On active service I was pushed on three or four occasions to put the pips on but if I had become an officer I wouldn’t have had the time to look after the lads. We had some damn good officers but I am confident I could have been better as I could go further with the men.
We came south to Winchester, our number one spot. It depended on what we were doing as to where we stayed, along the coast or in the forest in Norfolk. At night the forest was quite a lot of fun. It was hard work tracking at night, being smacked in the faces by branches. We developed a sort of night vision — I can still see very well at night.

D-Day

In September 1943 we were shooting across the channel regularly. There was six months of ‘sniffing’ before D-Day along the Pas de Calais, from Calais to the Somme.
In the beginning of April 1944 we were sailing into a French harbour on an exercise. I found myself having to go forward to see the skipper about giving out the escape money (to be used to get us through Spain). The whole world had become brighter than daylight. The Germans were having an anti-invasion exercise. We back-paddled our way out; there were plenty of guns and shells going off but nothing touched us. The joke we had amongst ourselves was that we would be quiet next time.
On D-Day we had landed at the River Bella, on the west side of Ouistreham. We landed there and made our way to the six-gun battery at the mouth of the Orne. In Ouistreham today there is a tall concrete tower, which was on the beachfront with the battery then, all the buildings in front of it have been built since.
All we could see was the row, the narrow window from which they were shooting. One of the lads got hit by a sniper. One aimed at me, but missed and shot my mate through the throat because he was sticking his neck out. I put a compress on it.
I went to see the captain as we needed to get away from there as the snipers were picking us off as we were at the base of the guns. The Sergeant-Major came to have a look at the situation. He got shot straight in the chuff (the buttock). It caused great hilarity as he went down the road with his shirt-tail in the wind. We left and went back to where we landed and then went on to Pegasus Bridge at Benoville.
We didn’t take the road so that we could avoid the Germans. We stayed under cover, first crossing the canal, off the road and across the field to a river. I ran and jumped over the river but my mate needed encouragement. He ended up in the middle of the river. When I pulled him up and out he had left his boots behind. He had to spend three days without them. We found a German digging a hole in the road so we took his boots. However my mate couldn’t wear them and he threw them in a hedge.
Ten days after D-Day we were patrolling in the Pas de Calais. We were on the headland opposite Ouistreham and could look along the river to Troam. I was having a shuffle around and this body of men came out from the trees. They got beyond Troam to Caen and then the guns opened up. The aircraft came over (I had never seen them before) and they bombed the German party. Within an hour the whole lot of them had been stopped.

Breville

We made our base outside the Chateau in Breville for a day or so. It provided cover. We lost a couple of lads there. We had got together in a group when a shell came over which landed directly behind me. The shrapnel took the number 4 from the 4 Commando badge on my shoulder. It hit Jock in the head and he died in front of me. Hutchison (Hutch) Burt, our captain, got peppered and was injured (he later got an MC). I was lucky it didn’t damage me.
At Breville my ‘bedroom’ was under a fir tree, it protected me from shrapnel. Jerry did blast us quite a bit. We did have some casualties in the village and we buried three at the Chateau. They were buried later at Ranville, the Airborne’s Cemetery. There are crosses after crosses there.
From Breville we went camping and did a lot of sniffing. We saw a few ‘naughty boys’ that we sorted out. The French around us were good to us. We did a lot of supplying for them but they cooked for us. It was something to sit at a table rather than on your arse in a field.
There was a farm barn that we used as an RV (rendezvous) point. While we were there I went down a wagon way to get some grog. I heard a bang-bang. ‘Here we go’ I thought and into the ditch we went.
We didn’t see anything so we went back. The barn was on the ground. The explosion had been the cans of petrol we used for heating. Someone had lit a cigarette. The thatch had caught fire. It was a beautiful barn with a cider mill, a big wheel and a trough to put the apples in. The tin of petrol had not been screwed down. A couple of days later the same fellow brought a petrol tin into a room. I told him that if he lit up again my 45 would speak to him!
The end of my war
On our way up to the Seine in August 1945 we got together to do the flushing job. I was hit at the end of the old bridge at St Michel. I finished up having a dunk. We had pitched our tent in an orchard. To catch the bus that was picking up the wounded I had to walk about five miles with my pack and wounded leg only to find the bus fifty yards from where I started.
I spent the rest of the war at Wrexham. I was written off as an active soldier and went back to the Glosters to be released.
I have been back a few times since the war.

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